About

I’m David Porter, a freelance photographer living in South East London, and I have pretty firm views about things like local food, and seasonality. Happily I travel around the country a bit, and always try to find the time to visit farmers markets and farm shops wherever I go, and sometimes local growers and farmers. My rule of thumb is “eat less, if necessary, to eat well”. I can see no point in buying plums from South Africa, green beans from Kenya, apples from New Zealand, and so on, when we grow better produce in this country. This means of course that I rarely visit a supermarket.

The co-author of this blog is Clarissa, a great cook and a stylist, and (she’d like me to add) a great artist! For all of our working lives we’ve both been involved in magazines, and Clarissa worked with Keith Floyd for 6 years.

Hi David – I would like to follow your blog by e-mail – is there a chance you could add that widget to your site? Sorry for the bother but I love the content of your blog and don’t want to miss any posts. Cheers, Patricia Shea
I will join you on FB and Twitter too – but still I might miss the posts there :)

I am the editorial director at the Harvard Common Press in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. You can see the books and read about the company at: http://www.harvardcommonpress.com.

We recently launched our own blog, called blogEATS (www.blogeats.com … though it needs a little more design work). It’s a blog about new, interesting, surprising, neglected, and generally useful things in the food blogosphere. Here is a little internal description, which I wrote for my colleagues, that describes its purposes:

“blogEATS is Harvard Common Press’s blog about what’s interesting and new in the food blogosphere. It covers food trends, good writing about food, great recipes, seasonal topics, and key cooking categories like baking and vegetarian. It’s written in the voice of an editor who is a good judge of these things and who spends a decent amount of time reading and evaluating food blogs. Although it includes links and excerpts, it has its own strong (and warm and humorous) voice that’s meant to provide a reliable and engaging roadmap–not unlike a travel guide–to blogs and bloggers worthy of note. Its scope includes well-known bloggers, talented newcomers, and experienced but underappreciated bloggers who have been flying under the radar. The intended audiences are: savvy home cooks; other food bloggers; chefs and food purveyors; and writers, editors, publishers, producers, publicists, and others in who work in food media.”

This is more of a business-oriented description than one I would use to attract readers. But it covers the basic ideas. Note that the tone will always be positive–I’m recommending, not reviewing. The various bloggers whose books we are publishing over the next couple of years all think it’s a good idea, as do others. I’d be happy to get your opinion as well (and also to hear about any book ideas you might have).

I write because I would love to do a writeup about your blog, with one recipe; I then would show the writeup to you and ask for permission to run the recipe and its photo. The one I am most interested in is the pudding recipe that provided the name for you blog.

If I were writing to you a year from now, I would hope to be able to promise you lots of traffic as a result. But if you gave permission you would be on the blog permanently as one of the first posts–for what we hope will be a long and successful run.

Please let me know what you think. Note, too, that I will happily make any corrections to factual errors that you see when I show you the draft.

I happened across your blog site and very impressed. As a Myatt with a link back to Joseph Myatt and having always been told about him and some supposed silverware presented to him by Queen Victoria I and my brothers have always kept looking to find more about him. Interestingly we have been in contact with the winery in Australia and have had the luxury of sampling a number of bottles – first class wine! and also strangely we are all keen cyclists and in Sussex there is still an event named after Mad Jack Fuller – amazing how things travel the centuries without one realising the history.
Best Regards

My name is Tanya Mokdad, I’m writing to you from the London College of Communication based in Elephant and Castle and I’m conducting research in the field of food and its association to cultural identity in the frame of cosmopolitanism, specifically in London.

If you would be so kind as to give me about 15 minutes of your time, I would very much like to interview you to get a food connoisseur’s point of view, ideally, either in person or over the phone. Alternately, I could interview you via email.

If you agree to this interview it would be great and really helpful to me. Just let me know by email.

Hi David, my wife I s Eva Myatt, a direct descendant of Joseph Myatt, Joseph had a son james who moved to the vale of Evesham to set up. Market gardens, his brothers also farmed in the vale, she is very interested in her ancestry and hopes to visit myatts field park in Brixton and nun head cemetery one day, kind regards john griffin